The Party eBook

“My friends!” said the uncle who was a
colonel, and there was a note of exhaustion and bitterness
in his voice. “Who says that family honour
is a mere convention? I don’t say that at
all. I am only warning you against a false view;
I am pointing out the possibility of an unpardonable
mistake. How can you fail to see it? I am
not speaking Chinese; I am speaking Russian!”

“My dear fellow, we do understand,” Ivan
Markovitch protested mildly.

“How can you understand if you say that I don’t
believe in family honour? I repeat once more:
fa-mil-y ho-nour fal-sely un-der-stood is a prejudice!
Falsely understood! That’s what I say:
whatever may be the motives for screening a scoundrel,
whoever he may be, and helping him to escape punishment,
it is contrary to law and unworthy of a gentleman.
It’s not saving the family honour; it’s
civic cowardice! Take the army, for instance.
. . . The honour of the army is more precious
to us than any other honour, yet we don’t screen
our guilty members, but condemn them. And does
the honour of the army suffer in consequence?
Quite the opposite!”

The other paternal uncle, an official in the Treasury,
a taciturn, dull-witted, and rheumatic man, sat silent,
or spoke only of the fact that the Uskovs’ name
would get into the newspapers if the case went for
trial. His opinion was that the case ought to
be hushed up from the first and not become public
property; but, apart from publicity in the newspapers,
he advanced no other argument in support of this opinion.

The maternal uncle, kind-hearted Ivan Markovitch,
spoke smoothly, softly, and with a tremor in his voice.
He began with saying that youth has its rights and
its peculiar temptations. Which of us has not
been young, and who has not been led astray? To
say nothing of ordinary mortals, even great men have
not escaped errors and mistakes in their youth.
Take, for instance, the biography of great writers.
Did not every one of them gamble, drink, and draw down
upon himself the anger of right-thinking people in
his young days? If Sasha’s error bordered
upon crime, they must remember that Sasha had received
practically no education; he had been expelled from
the high school in the fifth class; he had lost his
parents in early childhood, and so had been left at
the tenderest age without guidance and good, benevolent
influences. He was nervous, excitable, had no
firm ground under his feet, and, above all, he had
been unlucky. Even if he were guilty, anyway
he deserved indulgence and the sympathy of all compassionate
souls. He ought, of course, to be punished, but
he was punished as it was by his conscience and the
agonies he was enduring now while awaiting the sentence
of his relations. The comparison with the army
made by the Colonel was delightful, and did credit
to his lofty intelligence; his appeal to their feeling
of public duty spoke for the chivalry of his soul,
but they must not forget that in each individual the
citizen is closely linked with the Christian. . .
.